FROM PAGE
TO SCREEN: WORLD WAR Z (TBA)

Even
if you are tired of zombie flicks, you'd be glad to hear that World War Z – a
novel about a zombie infestation that almost destroys the entire planet –
is being turned into a movie . . .

Written in 2006, World War Z was the “sequel” to
author Max Brooks’ The Zombie Survival Guide, which offered
“complete protection from the living dead” as the blurb declared. It was a
one-joke, tongue-in-cheek book in which that one joke got pretty tired
pretty quick and it is best read (if at all) as a companion piece to
World War Z.

World War Z is one of those fictional books that
pretends to be non-fiction – who knows what aliens scavenging the remains
of our dead culture will make of all this one day! It tells the story of a
zombie plague that nearly wiped out mankind when governments and armies
are initially unable to control the global infestation. Ten years after
the war has ended, author Max Brooks goes around interviewing various
people across the globe about their experiences during World War Z.

A critic once remarked of George Romero’s seminal 1968
zombie flick Night of the Living Dead
that it is a science fiction movie pretending to be a horror movie. The
same goes for World War Z. It is more science fiction than horror,
less interested in chills than in recounting how this future world’s
various governments and societies fail to cope with a virus that turns the recently dead into mindless
cannibalistic creatures that in turn infect the living.

Ironically it is only geographically isolated,
authoritarian societies such as North Korea and Cuba that copes best with
controlling the outbreak. (In a stunning reversal of fortune, Cuba in fact
becomes the world’s economic powerhouse since its population and
infrastructure remain largely unscathed during the outbreak. All because Castro’s secret police
early on threw the zombies into prison camps!) Open democratic societies
have a much tougher time halting the spread of the disease and coping with
the zombie hordes within their own borders. Brooks especially has it in
for incompetent government bureaucracies (which keep the public uninformed
of the rising threat in an effort to prevent any large-scale panic) and
huge multinational corporations that cynically produce a zombie
“inoculation” that doesn’t work.

What is Brooks trying to tell us? That our governments
will have a tough time coping with a large-scale zombie infestation? No
arguments there. We don’t think that that is exactly a possibility covered by
their Civil Defense planning . . .

The zombie invasion alters the Earth’s geopolitical map.
Pakistan and Iran nukes one another; China becomes a democracy following a
civil war; and Russia becomes a scary theocracy. Unlike Brooks’ previous
novel, World War Z is pretty darned serious. And it works rather
well except for one or two daft moments. In one such daft segment a blind
Japanese pensioner becomes an adept zombie-slayer. In another South Africa
repurposes an old Apartheid-era plan that was meant to be a last possible
resort to deal with a full-scale uprising by its native Black population.
The plan ends up saving the world, thanks to Nelson Mandela – the Great
Reconciler – who insisted upon it being used even though it was dreamt up
by a racist apartheid apparatchik!

The good outweighs the bad by far however. There are
several action set pieces in the novel that makes one salivate at the
thought of them being turned into a movie. One is in an “interview” in
which a US soldier tells of the epic Battle of Yonkers. The battle was
supposed to be a showpiece by the US
military to illustrate that it is indeed ready to simply blow away the
zombie threat. The direct opposite of course happens: the battle is a huge
setback instead. The soldiers are trained for conventional warfare
against, well, the living. Being engulfed by hordes of the undead that can
only be killed by headshots wasn’t exactly something NATO planners
considered a possibility during the Cold War. Soon they are overrun by the
living dead despite their massive firepower.

(Click on image to enlarge)

Another great action scene is one in which a lone female
pilot crash-lands in hostile zombie territory and must make her way to a
safe zone. Other “interviews” or segments include a soldier telling of the
extreme disciplinary measures taken by the Russian military when soldiers
refuse to leave doomed civilians to their fate; a Japanese computer geek
escaping his infested apartment block using sheets tied together like in
a, er, movie; divers having to clear the ocean bottom of “live” zombies;
and so on.

Sure, some of it is your typical post-apocalypse stuff that
will be familiar to anyone who has seen
28 Weeks Later, I Am Legend or even
The Happening, but Brooks lends an
unexpected emotional resonance to the material at hand by taking it all
very seriously. This ain’t no Shaun of the Dead.
Which is probably how Brad Pitt’s production company (who obtained rights
to the novel after outbidding Leonardo diCaprio’s company) managed to
attract Marc Forster to direct a movie version of the book. The movie is
set for a 2010 release date.

Forster is a very “serious” film-maker (The Kite
Runner, Monster's Ball, Stranger Than Fiction) who is sometimes
criticized for his ham-fisted approach by film critics. He has proven
himself capable of directing larger scale action blockbusters with the
recent Bond movie, Quantum of Solace. Quantum was however a
mixed bag at best, but hopefully Forster has been reading some reviews and
will have dropped some of his annoying tricks copied mostly from the
Bourne movies such as jerky cam movements, incoherent editing and the
like. (As well as his attempts at being “deep,” which in Quantum resulted
in a laughably pretentious action scene set in an opera house.)

J. Michael Straczynski, best known for
Babylon 5, has already
written a script for World War Z. There are two ways for a
film-maker to present the material at hand: a fake documentary approach
which echoes the mockumentary “interviews” in Brooks’ book; or a
straight-forward narrative in which several of the characters in the book
are condensed into one or two central figures. Wisely enough Straczynski
has opted for the latter option. After all, did we really need yet another
zombie movie filmed in the style of
Quarantine?

Forster has likened the planned movie to ‘Seventies
conspiracy thrillers such as All the President's Men. Straczynski
in turn has compared the movie to The Bourne Identity and remarked
that World War Z will have a large international scope while
keeping the film as political as the book was. Judging from some concept
art work leaked onto the Internet (see this page), it seems that this approach still means
an epic approach in which scenes such as the Battle of Yonkers scene have
been retained.

There are many such epic scenes – of masses of humanity
fleeing the oncoming zombie hordes; of harbors being blocked by derelict
ships; and so on. As of yet little is known of the project. There have
been no announcements regarding casting and the film’s budget. Filming
such scenes can be hugely expensive. The famous evacuation scene in Will
Smith’s I Am Legend is rumored
to have cost the studio anything from $5 million to $30 million, for
example. One can only wonder how much World War Z is going to cost
- and whether it will be money well spent. Horror movies have great
opening weekends, but they soon taper off at the box office. They are
ultimately profitable because they are cheap to produce. You don’t need expensive
crowd scenes and CGI effects to make Friday the 13th or
Halloween, but if they want to do Brooks’ book justice then that is
exactly what World War Z will need.

This means that World War Z will probably be
marketed at more mainstream audiences to justify its no doubt bigger
budget. Does that mean a star for the main role instead of the usual
unknowns to be found in horror flicks? One can only speculate. A
“borderline” expensive horror movie such as I Am Legend only scored big at
the box office because it had Will Smith and a minimum of gore. Director
Forster would probably want to push World War Z into more
“dramatic” pastures instead of focusing on its horror elements. The
problem is, will mainstream audiences buy into a post-apocalyptic zombie
flick after the likes of 28 Days Later
and its sequel, I Am Legend and Dawn of
the Dead not to mention the countless other recent cheapo zombie DVDs
making the shelves groan at your local video store?

Still, whatever the end product may be: World War Z
is a worth-while read that even those tired of zombies would want to
check out. The whole zombie plague destroying mankind thing may be a
cliché, but Brooks still manages to make something worthwhile out of the
premise. Fans of End Times literature should check it out before the film
hits the big screen. Moviegoers on the other hand can only hope for the
best . . .